Free Society

The Rise of the American Gestapo

by John W. Whitehead August 2, 2019

“Adolf Hitler is alive and well in the United States, and he is fast rising to power.”—Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, on the danger posed by the FBI to our civil liberties Despite the finger-pointing and outcries of dismay from those who are watching the government discard the rule of law at ...

2002 Landmarks on the Road to “1984” Orwellian Hell

by James Bovard August 1, 2019

Next month will be the 18th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Politicians and bureaucrats wasted no time after that carnage to unleash the Surveillance State on average Americans, treating every person like a terrorist suspect. Since the government failed to protect the public, Americans somehow forfeited their constitutional right to privacy. Despite heroic efforts by former NSA staffer Edward Snowden and a host of activists ...

Hazony’s Tradition-Based Society Is a Form of Social Engineering

by Richard M. Ebeling July 31, 2019

At any moment in time, the world seems to be going to hell in a handbasket. Manners are missing; ethics are being eliminated; culture is corrupted; social attitudes are supercilious; virtues are vanishing; literature is mostly licentious; industry and commerce are materialistically crude and callous; and humaneness is hamstrung by greed and selfishness. It’s the end of civilization. And ...

The Tyranny of the Police State Disguised as Law-and-Order

by John W. Whitehead July 25, 2019

“But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.” ― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children ...

Conservative Nationalism Is Not About Liberty

by Richard M. Ebeling July 23, 2019

For almost 200 years there have been two political movements in opposition to the liberal political philosophy of individual liberty, free markets, and constitutionally limited government: socialism and nationalism. They both have called for reducing the individual to a cog in the machine serving a wider collectivist good. Given that socialism has been making a political comeback, it is ...

Simon Newcomb and the Let-Alone Principle

by Richard M. Ebeling July 19, 2019

Wherever we turn, there are some people who are busy telling the rest of us how we should live; with whom we should interact, and under what circumstances; how much we should be paid, and where and how we may work and produce; what we should pay for something we want to buy, and how it can ...

Progressive Promises and the Cost To Liberty

by Richard M. Ebeling July 9, 2019

Promises, promises, promises. It is the season for political promises. The candidates competing to be the Democratic Party candidate for president in 2020 are out in force trying to outbid each other with promised horns-of-plenty to any and all who might be voting in that party’s primaries beginning in a mere matter of months.  There are a handful of ...

Learning Liberty and the Power of Principles

by Richard M. Ebeling July 1, 2019

In The Constitution of Liberty, free-market economist and social philosopher F.A. Hayek, quotes in a footnote the famous nineteenth-century scientist Louis Pasteur: “In research, chance only helps those whose minds are well prepared for it.” What Pasteur was, no doubt, getting at is that unless the researcher already has been trained in the principles and methods of his own ...

The Hypocritical Double Standards of Political Outrage

by John W. Whitehead June 27, 2019

“She was asked what she had learned from the Holocaust, and she said that 10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and that 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and that the remaining 80 percent could be moved in either direction.”—Kurt Vonnegut Please spare me the media hysterics and the outrage and ...

The Omnipresent Surveillance State

by John W. Whitehead June 12, 2019

“You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”—George Orwell, 1984 Tread cautiously: the fiction of George Orwell has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state. It’s been 70 years since Orwell—dying, beset by fever and bloody coughing ...

What Would a Free Society Actually Look Like?

by Laurence M. Vance June 1, 2019

It is a common occurrence at sporting events. Someone is singing the U.S. national anthem — “The Star-Spangled Banner” — and when he gets to the last line of the first verse (although the song has four verses, the first verse is the only one that is ever sung), the crowd starts cheering and shouting after the singer utters ...

Adam Gurowski: Polish Champion of American Liberty

by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 2019

America! What a wonderful word. America! A word that has carried with it hopes and dreams, promises and possibilities; a new start and second chances. It has meant freedom, opportunity, and prosperity. Only in America! For many in faraway lands the word “America” still carries with it connotations of a better life, liberty, and enterprise. But what do these ideas ...